A few weeks ago I wrote about web design mistakes. One of the things that stuck in my head was that Google (and now Microsoft and Yahoo) have trained us to use a [blue black green] design. It’s interesting to run into sites that use search and observe how I react to either (a) this design or (b) a different design.

Today I saw a demo of Indeed.com which was positioned to me at “the Google for job search.” A quick search for jobs for firemen in Colorado brought up that [blue black green] thing. In contrast, when I looked for jobs in Colorado in delicious (no fireman jobs, so I had to drop that tag) the [blue black green] UI was now [blue light_blue red_highlight]. My brain definitely reacted differently – on the Indeed site I knew exactly what to do based on the colors; on delicious I had to think a little (not much) harder.

Now – I’m not a huge fan of the [blue black green] UI – it doesn’t take a lot of effort to come up with something that is aesthetically nicer. However, given the zillions of people who have had their “search behavior” trained by Google (and Yahoo and Microsoft), it seems like paying close attention to this UI is important.